Businesses often use customer contact centers that include agents of the corresponding business to process transactions and/or service the needs of their customers. Contact centers may also proactively contact potential and/or existing customers for offering products, conducting surveys, or rendering other services to those customers. Traditional ways for customers and agents to communicate with one another is by telephone, fax, and/or email. However, recent trends in social networking, multimedia, and the Internet generally, have increased the variety of communication channels available for establishing contact between customers and agents. The extended channels of communication may be used for businesses to stay more connected with their customers.
In traditional contact centers, representatives of the business, or agents, are assigned to various customer tasks. Customer requests for live operator assistance, or real time assisted services, are commonly routed in “push mode” to the most appropriate agents serving as operators of the contact center. In “push mode,” the records regarding the customer and/or information relating to the call are “pushed” to one or more agents. The routing system of the contact center may analyze agents' status information, which may indicate whether a particular agent is busy with a given customer task (or with some other activity such as training), and which medium the agent is using in connection with that task. For work done by agents offline, which may be referred to as back office work, there is generally no visibility regarding the particular task the agent is handling for the customer. Furthermore, customer presence information (e.g., information indicating whether a customer is on hold in a queue) is also not generally visible to the agents. Having information about customer availability may be useful for agents conducting offline tasks if the agents want to contact the customers to whom the tasks relate.
In some instances, an agent engaged in an offline task may attempt to contact a customer by directly calling the customer's phone(s). However, attempting to connect with the customer in this manner may be inconvenient, intrusive, and/or impractical. For example, there may be multiple contact numbers on record for the customer, some of which may no longer be up-to-date. Furthermore, the availability of the customer prior to the attempted contact may be unknown to the agent. Accordingly, the success rate of achieving contact with the customer may be low, which may result in reluctance on the part of the agent to try to contact the customer in this manner again.
Accordingly, what is desired is a system and method for providing to agents engaged in offline tasks ability to access and assess customer availability quickly and reliably for allowing such tasks to be more quickly resolved.